This invention relates to services provided over a communication network, and more particularly to transfer processing in order to provide Web services from among plural Web servers in a network.
Available for multistage Web-service processing, where two or more Web service-processing units are allocated to two or more nodes to provide services (i.e., functions provided by executing programs and objects) in cooperation with one another, is the art described on page 6 in Java Web Services by David A. Chappell et al. published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. in March 2002. With this art, Web service-processing units providing the related services perform transfer of service processing to one another in order to reduce the failure to provide reliable services to clients' information-processing devices.
The above prior art has the following problem. If a request is transferred in serial manner from one server to the next to provide Web-service processing, a response to the request is returned in serial manner. Accordingly, those Web service-processing units which merely transfer the request to other units do not need to response but nonetheless participate in passing the response back to the client, thus wasting communication resources and times.